Crowdsourcing language contact: pronoun and article morphology in Trentino-South Tyrol and Veneto

This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the online crowdsourcing methodology and its use for the collection of linguistic data. The second part the pronominal and article case morphology of the linguistic varieties spoken in the Italian regions of Trentino-South Tyrol and Veneto. The first methodological part starts by discussing the larger project in which this dissertation was undertaken, VinKo ‘Varieties in Contact’. Vinko aims to collect linguistic data for all linguistic levels (e.g. phonology, morphology, and syntax) for the non-standard Germanic and Romance language varieties spoken in the Italian regions of Trentino-South Tyrol, Veneto, and Friuli Venezia Giulia. Through the VinKo website, linguistics questionnaires are crowdsourced among the populations of these regions. For this research, a morphological questionnaire composed out of picture-aided translation tasks and directed-free production tasks where presented in the form of two storyboard to participants. The questionnaire aimed to collected full paradigms for personal pronouns and definite articles in singular number in all language varieties. Due to the online methodology, a wide variety of speakers could be reached, resulting in a large dataset for all larger regional varieties (e.g. Tyrolean, Trentino, and Venetan) from a large number of different locations, ensuring that microvariation and internal variation would be captured. The smaller speech communities (e.g. Mòcheno and Cimbrian) have proven to be more difficult to reach and, while participants have been found, the numbers are low. Analysis of the collected data provides evidence that the tasks presented to speakers were successful in eliciting valid dialect production. The online medium of presenting the tasks was generally well-received by participants, and there are no indications that it caused issues for data collection. The second part focuses on the pronominal and article case morphology of the language varieties under investigation: Tyrolean, Mòcheno, Cimbrian, Trentino, and Venetan. The targets of the research are full pronouns and definite articles in the singular number as these parts of speech are expected to show the largest variety in inflectional case marking and case patterning. The chapters of part two are divided per language variety, providing a comprehensive synchronic description of the pronominal and article paradigms attested in the VinKo data, and a brief discussion of the found case patterns. The final chapter of this part discusses the data from a cross-linguistic perspective. Across the varieties of Trentino-South Tyrol and Veneto, the pronominal paradigms and case marking found across the German varieties show a large degree of variation between and within varieties. The pronominal paradigms of Mòcheno and Giazza Cimbrian use prepositional dative marking as an obligatory strategy, most likely supported by an equivalent pattern in the Romance varieties. iv